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Market Problems

February 11, 2011

How can you go wrong listening to your customers?" may sound like a rhetorical question. But, in fact, you can go wrong by listening to customers, if you hear them out and then assume that they are typical of other customers when they're not.

December 20, 2010

My pal Jim Holland has a nice post on getting started--and maintaining your relevance--in product management. You have responsibility and accountability. But market knowledge is the source of authority.

I recommend product management start with Market Authority.

Market Authority is the foundation of sustainable product vision and all the moving parts that follow. While I placed Product Vision first in my post, I stated, “Product management has a great influence on product vision. Driving strategy as a leader begins with knowing your markets.”

September 24, 2010

A market can be thought of as the collection of contexts in which you might sell your product. You can split your market into a set of market segments. Each of those segments represents a group of customers, each of whom shares a set of problems for which they would pay for solutions.

July 20, 2010

As Clayton Christensen argues in the Innovator's Dilemma, the best move when the market is over-served is to innovate from below, not to join the new feature arms race. Less can be more. Simplicity is the killer app.

July 10, 2010

Being customer driven is great. Tap into the voice of the customer, and channel his wants and needs into compelling products and messages for rapid business growth, high profits, and stellar performance.

How can that be dangerous?

Simple- the wrong customer. You don’t tap into the voice of your TARGET customer in your TARGET market. And the ideal customer for you is often hidden in the silent majority- people who aren’t talking to you now because you aren’t talking about their needs, busy as you are talking to existing, different, customers.

April 13, 2010

I have to applaud the Jawbone ICON people for setting up a feedback mechanism for their online MyTalk service. It's fairly cool! It lets you change the voice (from "The Hero" to "The Catch!") and install one of three minor apps on the headset.

At the conclusion of the survey I get an opportunity to win--wait for it--a free Jawbone ICON. That is, I'm taking a survey for a service I use with my Jawbone ICON and I'm entered into a drawing to win... a Jawbone ICON. Hmmm. Something's wrong here.

But that isn't really my point.

After asking me a few fairly interesting questions about the application, the last question is:

Someone must've written a book on surveys that says to always end with an open-ended question. But "What other products should we develop?" is exactly the wrong question. I doubt they get any valuable insights from this. A better question is "What other problems do you encounter?" but even that I wouldn't have been able to answer. Maybe "What else would you like us to know?" is a good ending. That is, leave space for comments of any type: satisfaction with the device, the service, the survey.

You don't discover problems in a survey; you validate and quantify what you've learned from personal experiences and interviews.

Before a survey, someone in product management needs to spend some time observing problems.

August 14, 2009

ISleptThroughClass.com is an innovative and dynamically driven Web 2.0 business that allows all U.S. college students to solve the problem of missed classroom notes. We do this by enhancing their academic experience through an educationally oriented social network.

Huh? This thing is actually cool. Students post notes for those who missed class and get credits toward other purchases.

June 23, 2009

Too many product managers use opinions when data is required; they are in the office more than they should be. Market facts are found in customer environments, not in company meetings. NIHITO, baby!

It seems reasonable to be able to visit customers in their place of work but my friend Dave wonders about visiting people in their homes.

I think this gets into a tricky area. How do you set up a home visit? And should you?

I don't know about you but I'd be cautious of being alone with people in their homes. Lots of opportunity for misunderstanding. So be sure to do home visits with a colleague. And this may be inappropriate to say but I suggest that men should always do home visits with a female co-worker. Maybe I'm just a victim of the sexual harassment police but I'm uncomfortable being alone with any woman who isn't my wife.

If you sell products for home use, you really should understand the customer environment. Sitting in a person's home reveals much about the person and about the way the product will be used. You can see how the product does or could integrate with the rest of the household. With customers, you can see misuse of the product or whether it's under a bed or table without adequate ventilation, for instance.

Years ago, we had a pilot project for PC use in truck stops. Neither the engineers nor the product managers anticipated how much dirt was found in a truck stop! We found a thick layer of dust covering the motherboard, the fan could barely move from the accumulation of grime, and the PC was running much hotter than designed--there was no way for it to cool down. After only one month, the PC was choking! Poor thing! While not a home-use example, the truck stop was an environment that we couldn't duplicate in a lab. After all, we all work in air-conditioned cubicles.

One product manager specializing in home-school products set up three home visits with home school parents and learned much about the way the home school area was set up (or wasn't) and how the parents integrating learning into the family structure (or didn't). Could you see that in a coffee shop?

But if a home visit isn't possible, an interview at a coffee shop is a nice alternative. In fact, in most cases I would suggest that you start with an interview in a public place. If the interview progresses well and you create trust (both ways), then a home visit is a nice follow-up.

In a coffee shop interview, ask the client to walk you through a typical day. How does paper move around? What approval steps are necessary? When do they use the computer and when do they use Post-It notes? A coffee shop interview is better than a phone interview but an in-home interview is best of all.

In the old days, family doctors made house calls an integral part of their practices. How can you understand a family's health without seeing the family's environment? The same is true for product managers of products used in the home.

April 15, 2009

Here's a success story on personas and their problems. Skullcandy makes headphones designed for snow boarders.
Because they involve their personas in the product design, they get products that snow boarders want to buy and they tell their friends.
To the tune of $85M in revenues.

Lessons: Immerse yourself in your personas and their problems and
you'll design a remarkable product. But it's not just about design, it's about careful marketing through the right distribution channels.

March 05, 2009

In our training classes, we emphasize the importance of solving market problems. Describing problems encountered by our target personas. It's the problem that drives product requirements. Yet we've become an industry of feature-speakers. "I want this and this and this and this!" Wait! What is the problem??

As teams embrace agile methods, some seem to have jumped backwards a decade,
getting back to the thinking that opinions drive feature decisions; this is just wrong. Use market facts
to uncover problems that customers are willing to pay to solve. Perhaps
it's the pace of agile development, needing new items for the backlog
every other week. Or perhaps it's a shift in the power of the "team"
over the power of market facts.

If you're a product manager, you need to be delivering
quantified market data to your product team; if you're a developer, you should demand it. Otherwise, the team will use
their opinions of what they think people want. After all, in the absence of market facts, he who owns the compiler wins.

January 26, 2009

Product
managers need to intimately understand their markets in order to be
effective. They must know the customer better than they know
themselves. Yet meetings and administrivia fill their schedules. What's
needed is a challenge for product managers to visit customers with
specific tasks and tips to get started.

October 29, 2008

The PLATFORM strategy is one of the five strategies recommended in The Marketing Playbook
by Zagula and Tong. Rather than assuming customers want one-stop
shopping, the platform strategy encourages third-parties to extend your
product with accessories.

The famous case of dBase III shows how an extensible solution led to
an industry full of thousands of VARs actually adding value to the
basic dBase III platform. Then, as explained by Rick Chapman in his
book In Search of Stupidity,
the execs at Ashton-Tate decided to kill the third-party market but
instead destroyed the dBase product. The dBase platform created the
third-party community but the third-party community ultimately created
the success of the platform.

People spend much more on the accessories than for their iPods and
Blackberries. Didn't you buy the better headset, the bluetooth, the car
mount?

I
have a Toyota Camry. It has a nice little cubby with a line-in jack for
my iPod. Uh, how do I select songs? Oh yes, open the cubby, remove the
iPod, choose your playlist, put it all back in the cubby, and enjoy!
Hmmm, sounds like the dashboard designers didn't want anything to
interfere with the elegance of their design. It seems that Toyota (and
all car manufacturers) would rather sell me rims and sports apparel
than a phone or iPod mount that integrates with the dashboard.

Thankfully, the team at ProClipUSA
has the solution. They have figured out clever ways to shove a mount
into the joints and openings of most car models. First, tell them what
car you have and they'll tell you what mounts work; then tell them what
device you have and voila! you have a holder for your iPod, your
Blackberry, your GPS, your whatever.

You'd think that the car designers would offer these dashboard
"extensions" for the most popular third-party devices or perhaps they
should set up a partnership with ProClipUSA. Instead they assume a
"closed" posture and miss an opportunity.

Should you pursue a platform strategy? You could. You can create a
better customer fit without using your own resources. To do so, provide
APIs and partnering programs to extend your product without doing
everything yourself.

January 28, 2008

Win/Loss analysis is an extremely important activity yet is performed by fewer than 20% of product managers. Sales people either don't do win/loss or don't do it well. Companies who invest in win/loss find more process problems than product problems. Which is easier to fix? And who better to tell what we do right and wrong than someone who recently tried to buy?

So anyway, I bought it while traveling, hooked it up to my PC in the hotel room, connected to the internet, and the phone activated immediately. I was actually amazed at how wonderful the experience was since I'd heard that many people had bad experiences. Happily I didn't.

This weekend, I took my daughter and her friend to see Harry Potter at the IMAX theater. [Man! That's a big screen! And that fight scene in the room with all the prophesies! Sweet. And did anyone else question their filing system?] But despite a sold-out show and over-the-top buzz, the theater seemed surprised that all these people were showing up. They were completely unprepared--so much so that the patrons took the law into their own hands and policed the queue. [How bad is it to jump a line for a kids' movie! Yeesh.]

But my experience is nothing compared to the story from James Stoup about buying a fan from Honeywell. (Don't drink anything while you're reading it!)

What's the difference between a product-driven and a market-driven company?

Product managers in the market-driven company look at the entire buying and using experience... beyond just the device or service itself. Apple did it right. The iPhone is indeed gorgeous! Activation was elegant and easy. Alas, for those who had problems, AT&T dropped the ball on customer service (no surprise). IMAX was thinking ticket sales instead of managing the thundering herd. The Honeywell fan? 'nuff said.

Some companies seem to say, "Once we have your money, who cares?" Market-driven companies say, "I want you to tell your friends!" And people do either way. Happy customers tell some people. Unhappy customers tell everybody!

It's five times cheaper to keep a customer than it is to get a customer. What portion of your marketing plan contains strategies for keeping customers?

May 31, 2007

Looking on a typical vendor web site, one finds varying levels of product information. Ideally, your potential customers will find the information they need to make a decision—or at least start making a decision. The best web sites combine business results with supporting technical detail to meet the learning needs of different buyer personas. Often those sites also include customer testimonials and quotes but of course, everyone realizes that only the best quotes have been picked. I mean, really, what vendor would include lousy quotes in their web site?

However, those negative impressions generally exist somewhere on the web. Contrast the typical enterprise technology vendor with those for consumer products. A primary difference is that consumer products are more often sold through distribution—and not exclusively. Therefore the seller is more inclined to encourage unbiased commentary than the product vendor. Check out the product information on Amazon or Musicians Friend. These sites are for product distributors rather than product developers. They offer third-party comments from respectable sources and from regular people. I generally find the recommendations helpful—if 9 out of 10 are favorable, I’m inclined to buy. I can quickly dismiss the statistically irrelevant, either pro or con.

On Amazon, you’ll find book blurbs from the publisher followed by commentary and recommendations from customers. Check out the discussion on David Meerman Scott’s book The New Rules of Marketing including my favorable review plus a few others.

On Musicians Friend, hundreds of people report that they have bought and loved the Shure SM58 vocal microphone. Hmm, maybe I’ll get that one since people seem to like it.

Since it’s unlikely you’ll have this unbiased information on your website, where will your customers go to find it? Where are your products being discussed online. And what are they saying about your company and your product? Do a web search for your company and product name and you’ll find out.